Smart Chairs - Navigation for your Simulation Users

If you are an event facilitator or educator in Second Life, you'll be responsible for organizing groups of avatars, either through a live lector, or a collaborative activity. It will be important to have defined paths for your guests, so they can easily navigate around your sim, and access the important event areas.

Currently, most event hosts do this by using amphitheatres, sidewalks, paths, signs, group notices, and land marks in order to ensure people get to where they are supposed to be.

However, all of these techniques rely on a constant assumption - that your user will already have the necessary navigation skills to move with ease, around your environment.

Well, as you know, with users varying skill levels, this assumption often leaves new users in the dark, fumbling with the keyboard and the interface while missing important event activities.

To overcome the varying skill levels of new users, I propose that we create a "Smart Chair" that all attendees can sit on when arriving at your sim. The Smart Char can be programmed to automatically register new users with your website, add them to a pre-selected or random group you have created, and then switch to autopilot mode and move the avatar to the correct location based on the current event list, or via a menu driven interface.

In order to create such a device, you'll need to have specific paths consisting of several waypoints pre-programmed into your simulation. These waypoints can also be made intelligent by having memory to know each waypoint each one connects too. Thus, if I place a waypoint down, and connect another waypoint to it, each waypoint can be made aware of each other, and the direction of travel using LSL scripting techniques. Once all waypoints are set up, shortest path algorithms can then be triggered to move a users Smart chair from one location to another.

The smart chairs can even be made to listen to Region commands, so that if the facilitator wants to move users around on the fly, they could simply issue a region notices, and all chairs could react accordingly.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Smart Chairs
• Second Life
• Fire Centaur

[fire2006]

Please let me know if you have any ideas to add to this~